John R. Kelso’s Civil Wars:
A Graphic History - Episode 16

More on the text

Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy, 190-219.  Wiley Britton heard many of the stories about Kelso.  A native of Newton County, Missouri, Britton served the Union in the 6th Kansas Cavalry on the Missouri-Kansas border.  He heard more after the war as he conducted several thousand interviews while investigating pension and property compensation claims for the War Department.  Stories of Kelso’s “fearless operations against Southern bandits,” Britton wrote in one of his postwar histories, “were familiar to nearly every family in Southwest Missouri.” Britton heard from “the many witnesses examined who had reminiscences to relate of [Kelso’s] daring acts in the war.”  But Britton also had a brother and a brother-in-law who had served with Kelso, and the historian had corresponded with the man himself.  Britton wrote about Kelso in books such as Memoirs of the Rebellion on the Border, 1863 (1882), The Civil War on the Border (1899), and The Aftermath of the Civil War: Based on Investigations of War Claims (1924).  

Kelso’s “name was connected with so many acts of daring adventure in Southern and Southwest Missouri during the war” and he “was so much talked about by the Unionists and secessionists” in that region, Britton wrote, “on account of the numerous victims upon whom his avenging hands had fallen.”  Of course, “he was popular with and liked by the Unionists and sincerely hated by the Southern people.”  R. I. Holcombe, a less sympathetic local historian writing in the early 1880s, called Kelso “a desperate man” who was “fanatical in his Unionism” and who believed that all Confederates were traitors deserving death.  “It is said of him that he killed many a man without a cause.  Stories are told of him that make him appear . . . fit only to be denominated a monster, and entitled only to execration.  Doubtless some of these stories are exaggerations, but the fact remains that Kelso was a ‘bad man,’ and held human life in very cheap estimation.”

After Kelso’s death, in 1893 the St. Louis Republic published an article of over 5,300 words that conveyed something of both sides.  “The Scout of the Ozarks: John R. Kelso’s Mysterious and Bloody Career in Southwest Missouri” was based on interviews with people who had known him or known of him, including three men who had fought at his side.  Kelso’s name, the reporter wrote, was still “spoken with a shudder by many people along the Missouri and Arkansas border, though nearly 30 years of peace have helped to sustain or palliate the deeds of this fanatical partisan of the Union cause.”  Some of the stories about the man might “sound like the nursery tales of mythical desperadoes,” but, the journalist assured his readers, they were “well authenticated by witnesses still living.”